#BlogElul Day 6: Believe

There is so much to accept, to believe about the world and the people in it, just to make it through a regular day.

Believing really means accepting a certain map of reality.

I saw that metaphor of a map (an analog GPS of sorts) in Peck’s book “The Road Less Traveled”, a book I recommend.

In order to appreciate the real meaning of the word, as opposed to the very precise Christian take on it, we need to divorce the word from its religious context and see how we do that thing called “believing” thousands of times a day.

We call them preconceived notions, axioms, assumptions, presuppositions, biases, prejudices (meaning we’ve made up our minds before seeing the evidence in any one particular case.)

And once a thing is accepted, you just move on. That is how some really wacky cults have developed over the past couple of centuries. My lawyer has advised me not to name them.

So our belief in the value of our Jewishness begets our belief in Torah, which then begets several axioms that make our Judaism function, (13), which then begets our belief in Chazal (Rabbis) and general rabbinic authority, which leads to our belief in the power of Elul etc.